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Monthly Archives: June 2002

A friend of mine recently upgraded her Mac to OS X 10.1.5 and I’ve been spending a little time helping her get some useful Free Software stuff added on. Being able to click up a terminal window on a Mac is pretty cool. The BSD-based Darwin is a bit weird when you’re used to Linux but it’s not bad. You can’t log in as root or su to root on OS X. Apache and SSH were included but there are a few other things that I thought it would be useful to add. I looked at several projects that are porting Free Software to the Mac and decided Fink looked like the best place to start.

The only thing I found odd about Fink was that they chose to port the Debian packaging system instead of using the native OS X system. This means you end up having to manage two completely different sets of packages. The Fink packages all install in a different directory than the native stuff and this makes it easier to avoid conflicts. This was also my first experience with the Debian package system. I’m an RPM man, myself but I found apt-get to be pretty cool (it does have some advantages over RPM). On the other hand, dpkg is as counterintuitive as vi. After playing with it for about 15 minutes without being able to figure out what it was trying to tell me (much less getting to the point of actually installing a package) I finally gave up and had to use control-c to get out of it (which is, at least, a little better than vi – the first time I started vi, I spent a half hour trying to find a key combination that would let me exit and finally had to kill it from another terminal).

The Apache that comes with OS X is a fairly basic setup but they provide pretty straightforward instructions on their website for setting up mod_perl, PHP, and even Tomcat. So I ended up keeping it rather than using the alternate Apache package from Fink.

The OS X GUI is pretty slick too. It’s way ahead of Gnome and KDE (okay, I haven’t actually tried the Gnome 2 release yet). The downside to all this is that it costs quite a bit, only runs on Mac hardware, and it’s non-free. So I’ll be sticking with Linux for now. But I think for the first time, I might recommend a Mac over a Windows box when there are no other choices.

My friend, Robert, from Colorado sent me some photos of Colorado Springs showing all the smoke in the air from the Hayman fire.

And the photos from the DFW Mozilla Release party finally turned up. I’m in the group shot and there’s also a shot of me with Susan. Thanks to Bob Zoller for being the official photographer. We still need names for a couple of the individual shots and anyone in the group shot that isn’t named elsewhere. If you can identify any of the anonymous Mozilla supporters email Bob.

The only other news today is that I spent a lot of time upgrading Apache on our servers because of the chunk handling vulnerability. Working exploit code was posted on Bugtraq this morning, so I thought it might be a good idea to upgrade as soon as possible. We run Ximian Red Carpet on several of our machines and it makes installing all the latest versions of stuff really fast and painless most of the time. But when I fired up Red Carpet on the first server, it segfaulted during startup while connecting to Ximian. It did the same thing on the second server I tried it on. And on the third, fourth, fifth… Something must have been hosed up at Ximian that was causing all the Red Carpet clients to die. I filed a bug on it at Ximian (bad things happening at the server end are no excuse for the client to crash!). Looks like everyone else was busy filing the same bug and there were quite a few dupes by the end of the day. Anyway, I figured out a workaround to get Red Carpet working again and eventually got all our servers updated.

I’m looking forward to ArMozilla 1.0 tomorrow night; the Dallas/Ft.Worth Mozilla Release Party. I generally avoid parties whenever possible but this one sounded too unusual to miss. We’ll see. I’ve been waiting for someone to rewrite the lyrics to BOC’s Godzilla song, replacing Godzilla with Mozilla and maybe throwing in some lines about Microsoft’s army of evil monkeys or something. I haven’t seen anyone do it yet and I don’t think my song writing skills are up to the task either. Still, the original song is buzzing around in my head tonight.

With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound
He pulls the spitting high tension wires down

Helpless people on a subway train
Scream bug-eyed as he looks in on them

He picks up a bus and he throws it back down
As he wades through the buildings toward the center of town

As I got on the highway driving home last night, I was heading west and looking right into the sun around sunset. This is fairly normal. What isn’t normal is that there was a solar eclipse going on. A fairly amazing one with about a quarter of the sun’s disc covered. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m not supposed to look directly at the sun. But it’s unavoidable when the sun is that low in the sky and you’re driving straight towards it. Besides, how can looking at 75% of the sun be any worse than looking at 100% of the sun which I have to do on most days?

Anyway, it confirms my theory about astronomical events. The more they are hyped, the less worthwhile they are to see. Things like Halley’s comet which was hyped all my life as supposedly being the most amazing thing that man would ever see, turned out to be so obscure that you could look right at it and not even know if you saw it or not. Most other highly promoted astronomical events turn out to be a similar waste of time. I’ve seen many previous solar eclipses that were allegedly “the last eclipse that will be seen in 20,000 years, etc. etc.” (and used appropriate filters to look at them, of course). They were all rubbish. And usually, if you read the fine print, they’re really saying something like “the last eclipse that will be seen in 20,000 years that covers exactly 63.5% of the sun and can be seen on a Tuesday in the month December during the Reagan administration” or somesuch.

The really spectacular things I’ve seen in the sky I usually don’t hear much about before hand. Like the eclipse last night that I had no idea about until I saw it. Or a couple of years ago when I watched an event that turned out to be the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in the sky – the nighttime re-entry of a space shuttle over Texas. I just happened to see something on the local news about it and we walked outside a few minutes later and there it was.

The other interesting event today is that Microsoft found some goofy “think tank” that it could pay to issue a “study” claiming that all us Open Source and Free Software folks are a bunch of communists out to destroy the American way of life by standing up to poor, helpless corporations like Microsoft. I’d never heard of the “Alexis de Tocqueville Institution” prior to this but it appears to be one of those a “money for bogus research” places. The author seems to barely even grasp what software is, so it’s hard to take seriously his opinion that sharing my source code with others is a threat to the free world. As people stop laughing at the thing, I suspect a few rebuttles will be springing up across the web. The Roaring Penguin already has one up.